Wavves: Spun Album Assessment | Pitchfork

I hate to attract consideration to the unrelenting passage of time, however King of the Seashore simply celebrated its fifteenth birthday. Wavves’ breakthrough album is sort of sufficiently old to drive in frontman Nathan Williams’ house state of California, and its shaggy-dog slackerism has endured within the years since its launch, spawning a crowd of garage-rock imitators in its wake. And whereas it’s straightforward to look again on 2010 as an indie rock fever dream sponsored by City Outfitters, the album’s mixture of paranoia, nihilism, and despair nonetheless sounds a bit of radical in its reckless abandon.

Every subsequent Wavves album has been, to some extent, a response to King of the Seashore—Afraid of Heights slowed its tempo; V teased out its energy pop melodies; You’re Welcome returned to its producer, Dennis Herring; Hideaway experimented with its psych rock influences. However there’s solely so many occasions one can rhyme “ingesting” and “pondering” earlier than the efficiency of perpetual adolescence begins to put on skinny. On Spun, Wavves’ ninth file, Williams feels like even he’s starting to tire of his stoner schtick.

At its greatest, Wavves’ music vibrates with a type of productive insanity. There’s a stressed creativity on early songs like “Gun within the Solar” and “Seashore Goth,” the best way their glowing melodies can’t assist shining by way of the haze of his newbie recording setup. The squeals of suggestions, the unhinged screams—the strangest, and sometimes strongest, Wavves songs sounded pressing, as if Williams needed to get the hooks out of his head earlier than they drove him insane. On Spun, against this, it feels like he’s scarcely given these 13 songs a second thought, returning to the identical concepts time and again and hoping we’re too baked to note.

It’s tempting guilty Travis Barker, who produced two songs on Spun. The blink-182 drummer is to up to date pop-punk, within the eyes of some weary rock critics, what Jack Antonoff is to “predominant pop ladies” like Lorde and Taylor Swift. “Go away them alone!,” I need to scream every time I see Barker’s title on one more tracklist, whether or not Wavves or Elegant or Megan Fox’s new child daughter. Since serving to the artist previously referred to as Machine Gun Kelly pivot from writing Eminem diss tracks to wielding an electrical guitar, Barker has introduced sterilized drum fills and extreme vocal processing to artists like Avril Lavigne, Willow, LilHuddy and jxdn, flattening their particular person voices right into a homogenous whine. It’s no totally different on Spun: Williams’ voice is barely legible beneath layers of digital distortion on the Barker-produced “Goner,” whose palm-muted guitars and egregiously tedious chorus made me surprise if it was cribbed from some MGK reject pile.